1124564 - Address book column to show which book contains address

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1133652

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:35.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/35.0
Build ID: 20150108202552

Steps to reproduce:

I have multiple address books, including a Personal Address Book, a corporate LDAP address book, and Collected Addresses


Actual results:

When I open Address Book and enter a search expression, all matching addresses are listed.   Sometimes I have multiple addresses for one person.


Expected results:

Enhancement:   Add column showing which address book contains each found address.
Knowing at a glance which book contains the address makes it easier and faster to clean up the mess when there are multiple instances of an address, or when I find myself wondering "Wait, why do I have _that_ one in there?".

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

xref bug 170270, maybe we should show the column always...

Comment 2

[Suyash Agarwal (:sshagarwal)]

Sorry, but I don't understand this use case.
If there was a way to search across all ABs (except AutoComplet), why do we have bug 170270?
So, if bug 170270 is valid, that means, we currently can't search across all ABs.

And, whenever we are in All ABs (that is, there is an ambiguity in figuring out to which addressbook the concerned card belongs), "Address Book" column is/can be shown (enabled by default).

Thanks.

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

No, it's just that it may not be obvious that the search is only for the one selected ab (atm).

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Magnus Melin from comment #3)
> No, it's just that it may not be obvious that the search is only for the one
> selected ab (atm).

Well, there's always just one AB entry explicitly/visibly selected in the list of ABs on the left, and I think it's not too hard to understand from the UI and behaviour that the list of contacts currently shown will be filtered (there's no explicit hint for cross-AB search either). Which is typical behaviour for similar scenarios e.g. in Windows file explorer when using the searchbox there.

Jeff, in current release version of TB, you can only search one AB at a time, so there's no point of showing the source AB because it will always be the one which is highlighted on the left. Currently, only matching results from the (single) selected AB will be shown (never "all" matching results from all ABs). 

We're implementing cross-AB search and containing AB column in bug 170270 and by default, we'll show the source AB column for cross-AB search results.

(In reply to Magnus Melin from comment #3)
> No, it's just that it may not be obvious that the search is only for the one
> selected ab (atm).

Yeah, indeed that might be an issue when we offer cross-AB search.
I would agree that we could optionally offer the "Address book" column in every AB, not just "All ABs" view. For users with multiple ABs, it might make sense to always have the containing AB column clearly visible so they can manage their contacts with confidence.

Suyash, how hard would it be to make the "Address book" column available for each AB, not shown by default?

Comment 5

[Suyash Agarwal (:sshagarwal)]

(In reply to Thomas D. from comment #4)
> We're implementing cross-AB search and containing AB column in bug 170270
> and by default, we'll show the source AB column for cross-AB search results.
> 
> Suyash, how hard would it be to make the "Address book" column available for
> each AB, not shown by default?

Well, it was hard to hide it for specific ABs. Making it visible again would just require
reverting the hard work :)